(((Mazeltov Cocktail)))

The culture war is not a malfunction of American democracy. It is a feature of American empire. While the State Department was funding opposition media in Venezuela, American media was running wall-to-wall coverage of which bathroom transgender people should use. While the CIA was training civil society organizations to destabilize governments in Eastern Europe, American workers were being told that the reason their wages hadn't moved in thirty years was immigration. While the Pentagon was spending $300 million on a single failed program in Syria, American teachers were buying their own classroom supplies and working second jobs. The noise was never accidental. The noise was the point. A population fighting each other over the cultural battlefields the ruling class assigned them cannot simultaneously look upward at the people assigning the battlefields. That is not a conspiracy theory. That is a management strategy. It has a budget. It has architects. It has decades of documented results. And the first sign that it is working is that the people inside it call anyone who describes it a conspiracy theorist.

There is something that happens to Americans who actually reckon with the history. Not the ones who perform reckoning, who say "we need to do better" and mean better social media representation and more diverse superhero franchises, but the ones who actually sit with what was done in their name, in specific places, to specific people, over generations. Something breaks open. And what they discover on the other side of that breaking is not self-hatred, despite what the defenders of innocence always predict. What they discover is the ability to see. To see that the world is full of people who have been surviving American power for decades, who are not waiting for American permission to be legitimate, who have developed extraordinary intellectual and moral and political traditions that no textbook they were given acknowledged as real. To see that the countries described as "failed states" and "unstable regions" did not fail on their own. They were destabilized by specific actions taken by specific actors who are named in documents that exist in archives. To see that the "international community" that keeps appearing in news reports to validate or condemn countries is mostly the United States and its allies, and that the countries left outside that community are not left out because they failed a moral test but because they failed a loyalty test. To see all of this is not to hate America. It is to see clearly. And seeing clearly is the most threatening thing you can do to any system that depends on the population not seeing clearly. The ones who get there know something they cannot un-know. The empire needs them to not get there. It has built an entire culture to prevent it.